


Anecdotal

by duc



Series: The Overprotective Med Team [3]
Category: Star Wars - All Media Types
Genre: Anakin Lives AU, Gen, Post-Endor, The Overprotective Med Team
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-06-23
Updated: 2018-06-23
Packaged: 2019-05-27 09:16:15
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 609
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15021449
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/duc/pseuds/duc
Summary: When the medical team in charge of keeping Darth Vader alive after the battle of Endor found a bomb next to his liver, they weren't surprised. It was just one more entry in the long list of gross malpractice, medical neglect and straight up medical torture that was the Darth Vader suit. But when they looked a little closer and it became obvious the explosive and transmitter combo had been in there a lot longer than 20 years, they had questions. Such as, what were the Jedi thinking?





	Anecdotal

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Fialleril](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Fialleril/gifts).



"Slave transmitters are harmless once deactivated, and as surgery is frequently life threatening, removing them is medically contraindicated," Anakin Skywalker said from his hospital bed, impassive, as if he was talking about the weather, and not about a bomb under his skin. 

Being weirdly nonchalant about the giant medical malpractice that was his body was Anakin Skywalker's default. If she lived to a a hundred and fifty, Eran would still remember vividly the look on his face when he had agreed to let them install his new respirator - his new lightweight, unobtrusive and more importantly, painless respirator - as if he didn't quite see why they wanted to do it, but if it made them happy, why not?

But today, she thought, there was a certain glint in his eye, a certain studiedness in the way he delivered his speech, that gave her the impression his nonchalance was for once, not quite real.

"But that bullshit!" Healer Kelrn interjected.

"This is what hundreds of medical journals written by the most knowledgeable healers on the subject say," Anakin replied, in a mild scolding tone. 

 _Yep_. Eran thought. There was definitely something there.

Kelrn hadn't spent as much time around the elder Skywalker as Eran had and he didn't pick up on his tone, or he was too worked up to care.  "Yes, but they're bullshit!" he exclaimed incredulously. " _Everyone_  knows that. The healers writing them know that, the Hutts reading then know that - ok, the Hutt's minions reading them for the Hutts know that - , the freed slaves know that. Fuck! I'm pretty sure my uncle wrote one of those articles."

"Your uncle?!" Eran couldn't help but ask. It did not fit with what she knew of Kelrn's uncle.

"Yes! Because when you look too eager to perform slave transmitter removals, the masters start to wonder if you're only performing them on slaves that have been "legally" freed, or if you're going to start helping yourself to their propriety."

"Which, when you're running an underground clinic for escaped slaves, is problematic." 

"Yes," Kelrn said, smiling viciously. "Yes it is." 

They all mulled that for a second and then Healer Kenig, the head of the heavy trauma wing raised his hand. 

"When you say that it is 'bullshit', what exactly do you mean by that? I was told the explosive was stable and in no danger of blowing up."

Kelrn scratched the fur at the back of his head. "No, that implant is deactivated and in good shape and it  _is_  pretty much armless as it is.... But just because the concept has been idiot proofed doesn't mean there aren't the odd defect sometimes." he shook his head. "Just out of the top of my head, my uncle once got asked by Grakkus the Hutt to investigate the death of a handful of his slaves, their transmitter had gone off out of nowhere and he was worried someone had found a way to slice them - which would have been bad for business - but no, autopsy revealed the implants, all part of the same batch, had just degraded overtime and one good jostle had set the detonator off."

"Anecdota," Anakin deadpanned.

"And speaking of slicing," Kelrn continued as if he hadn't heard. "That something is prohibitively hard to tamper with doesn't mean it's impossible to tamper with, or even unheard off."

"Urban legend," Anakin countered.

Kelrn stared at him. "The Jedi were Core Worlders weren't they?" he said slowly, as if it was a revelation.

And as if he didn't mean Core Worlder in the sense that their Temple had been on Coruscant. 

Anakin nodded with the air of someone admitting an uncomfortable truth.  

**Author's Note:**

> Before I started stalking hanging out with Fialleril, I always assumed the Jedi had removed Anakin's slave transmitter, because even setting aside the ethical issues, who the hell leaves an explosive that they didn't put there and have minimal control over in one of their operative?!
> 
> But the implant was left in several on Fialleril's universe, and you cannot deny that the idea does have a certain symbolism (or that it appeals to the part of yourself that likes to wallow in angst), so I started to think about it and tried to make it make sense to me, and this is where I'm at. 
> 
> Slave transmitters, are about the size of a fingernail, and are injected into the body of the target wherever is most expedient, leaving a small puncture site that the slavers may or may not bother to treat. After injection however, the transmitter travels to a a random place in the body (so nobody knows where it is) and latches on, it's especially insidious on people who were born into slavery or enslaved as children because their bodies grow around and over it. This means surgery to remove them can dead simple, fast and easy as gently grabbing at it with pincer and sliding it out from between two layers of muscles or it can involve multiple hours of trying to untangle it from bone and nerves without killing your patient. 
> 
> They have also been engineered to be tamper-proof, both from stuff like hacking or from outside stimuli setting off the explosives. After all, the main goal there is to prevent loss of valuable propriety, and what's the point if every computer wiz in possession of a com can take control of them? Or if a hit in the wrong place can set them off? Therefore, once those things are off, they are almost* impossible to reactivate. 
> 
> *Note the almost, the almost is important.
> 
> Both of those things meant that, when healers in Hutt territory, where most of the demand for transmitter removal was, but there was no money or social capital to be gained from it, wanted an excuse to not do the surgery, they had some ready made justification to latch on. That meant that the majority of the medical literature on the subject was all about how the surgeries were dangerous and medically unnecessary and those freed slaves, bless their hearts, only wanted them for irrational psychological reasons.
> 
> And that was the literature the Jedi Healers found when Anakin was dropped into their lap and they researched the situation. It fit nicely with their preconceived notions so they never questioned it, and that's how Anakin spent 13 years as a Jedi, in the heart of the Republic, with a (deactivated) slave transmitter.


End file.
